John Lutz - Pulse

“That could be dangerous,” Pansy said. “We have roots that might be deeper than we know, and set in soil that would terrify us.”

“That’s why empathizing is as far as we go,” Harold said. “That’s the key difference between us and the people we’re trying to find and stop.”

Pansy aimed her warm glow at him, obviously pleased. “You are a very perceptive man.”

“It’s my job,” Harold said. “It makes me that way.”

Sal thought he might retch.

“Can you stay for some tea or coffee?” Pansy asked. “Both of you.” But she was looking at Harold.

“Thanks,” Sal said, “but we’ve got more calls to make.”

“Another time?”

“If you think of something pertaining to the case,” Sal said. “Call me. Leave a message if you have to, and I’ll get back to you. You have my card.”

Pansy followed them to the door and watched them for a while before moving back out of sight and locking herself into her apartment.

On their way down in the elevator, Harold said, “I wonder what else she can do with her toes.”

“That woman might be twenty years younger than you, Harold. Harold?”

“Sorry. I was empathizing.”

Jerry Lido, Q amp;A’s resident computer genius, came over to Quinn’s desk, shaking his head. If it could be traced anywhere on the Internet, Lido could find it. He seemed to possess some kind of innate

“Whaddya got?” Quinn said, looking up and noticing the expression on Lido’s face. He knew Lido had stayed up most of last night, drinking and communing with his computer. Now he appeared exhausted but triumphant.

“I found a few places where the skate keys could be bought on the net, hacked into their records, and came up empty. It was near six o’clock this morning by then. I took a short nap, then cleaned up some and had breakfast at a place down on Houston.” Lido was grinning.

Quinn was getting impatient. “And?”

Lido dropped a skate key on the desk. It looked identical to the one pressed into the flesh on the forehead of Deena Vess’s corpse.

“I got it at this little bike shop in the Village, also sells skateboards and such. Also roller skates, though not the kind that need keys. But they do have a bunch of those keys in a little bin near the front of the store.” Lido’s smile slipped away. “That’s the problem. Anybody coulda come in and stole one.”

“Did you ask if they’d sold any lately?” Quinn already knew the answer.

“They haven’t sold any in almost a year,” Lido said. “The guy let me have that one for free.”

“A dead end,” Quinn said glumly.

“Yeah. Not the key to the case.”

Quinn returned to his paperwork with the doggedness of a man getting accustomed to frustration, not liking it any more for the familiarity. “Go have some more breakfast, Jerry.”

What was the key to the case?

I t was like watching dinosaurs at play, if you overlooked the huge, knobby tires.

The roar had awakened her at eight o’clock sharp and continued steadily for the last three hours, so she never got back to sleep. Mildred Dash stood at her apartment window and watched the earth-moving equipment across the street.

The brick and stone walls of the buildings had come down days ago. Now the dinosaurs were scooting the wreckage around, even moving some of it with cranes (so like a brontosaurus, a crane), so it could be scooped up, loaded into squat and powerful dump trucks, and hauled away.

Mildred was tall and a bit too statuesque to be attractive. Though refined, even regal, in bearing, she was too rough hewn to be feminine. Her gray-tinged black hair was coarse, her features chiseled but not finely. Her nose was slightly too prominent, her chin too pointed. When she was very young, the boys had considered her a knockout. Now those same boys would have found her a little scary, like a dreaded substitute teacher.

Meeding Properties, and Enders and Coil, had learned not to take her lightly.

She was still wearing her robe, and wasn’t planning on going out today. There was no way she could escape the feeling that if she left her apartment, left the building, the neighborhood, even for a short while, the dinosaurs would attack. She would return not to her home but to ruins.

As a former practicing attorney, she knew the value of a fait accompli. The destruction of her building wouldn’t harm anyone, if the building was completely unoccupied. Even if she’d had enough legal claim to delay demolition almost indefinitely, her arguments would become moot in the dust of debris. Mildred Dash knew how the law worked-and how it didn’t work.

As matters stood, Jack Enders would continue his attempts to intimidate her, and kindly rattlesnake Joseph Coil would continue his folksy charm assault. They continued in their attempts to assess her, to read her motives and her intentions. It didn’t make sense to them. Of course it wouldn’t-to them. Even if she were to explain it to them, they’d nod their supposed understanding and then offer her money. Or at least try to talk her out of her intransigence. Become her saviors instead of her pursuers.

Mildred understood the puzzle piece that was missing, and whose absence caused all their other assumptions to be off the mark. Meeding Properties, and Enders and Coil, knew about the limited time she had left. They didn’t see why she wanted to spend it here, in the midst of demolition and debris. This had been her life, with her husband, her children, her tragedies and joy. Her meaningful life had been here, was still here.

Still here.

It was so simple, so foreign to them, that they overlooked it, couldn’t see it.

She refused to end her life before she died.

Jody found herself alone in the offices of Enders and Coil. Dollie, the receptionist, was up front in the anteroom minding the phones, but that didn’t count. Dollie didn’t venture back into the main offices unless she had a good reason, and with Jack Enders and the associates in court, and Joseph Coil on his way to Philadelphia to take a deposition, there wouldn’t be a good reason.

Jody took one of the two flash drives she’d bought on credit from an office supply and computer shop on East Fifty-fourth Street, and slipped into Enders’s office.

It was more than merely quiet in there; it was hushed. Jody had been told the offices of Enders and Coil had been specially insulated so they were virtually soundproof. That wasn’t quite true. If she listened closely, Jody could hear the rushing sound of Manhattan traffic.

Enders’s desktop computer sat blankly on its oak table nestled to the side of the desk. With a glance out through the slatted blinds covering the window to the hall, Jody booted up the computer. She’d lightly searched the office a few times and had no trouble coming up with the list of passwords Enders used. Genius9578 gave her access. She slipped the flash drive into a USB port on the side of the computer and copied the files and e-mail contents of Enders’s hard drive.

It took less than five minutes.

She removed the flash drive and returned it to her purse, then repeated the process with the second flash drive in Joseph Coil’s office.

So much more convenient than rummaging through paper files in steel cabinets, Jody mused. She regarded technology as her friend.

Jody and her friend were going to see what they could learn in addition to what she already suspected about Enders and Coil. And Meeding Properties.

Safely back in her own shoebox-sized office, she had to smile. She also had to admit to herself that she enjoyed what she was doing. It wasn’t only trying to right a wrong. It was also the secretiveness, the spying, the taunting of fate. She liked figuring the odds, then proving she’d figured right by experiencing the danger and accomplishing her goal. The danger. God help her, she loved the danger.